


Fine

by dashakay



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-14 00:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4543302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashakay/pseuds/dashakay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"How are you today, Dana?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fine

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to [Fifty-Four](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4516542).

“How are you doing today, Dana?”

Scully looks her therapist straight in the eye and smiles. “I’m fine,” she says, folding her hands together in her lap. She loves these noon sessions with Kathryn. It’s so calming to sit in in this pastel office, breathing in the scent of aromatherapy candles and listening to her therapist’s soft Virginia accent.

She  _is_  fine. Everyone keeps asking her how she’s doing—her mother, her brothers, her fellow doctors, even a few acquaintances at church. Her answer is always “I’m fine,” because she is. She’s just fine, thank you.

Her new condo is beautiful, on the twelfth floor of a brand new high rise that looks like it was built from an upscale Swedish Tinker Toy kit. There’s excellent security and the living room windows are huge and let in the morning sun. Before work, she likes to sit on the balcony and drink tea, watching Richmond come alive with the sun.

She splurged on a king-sized memory foam mattress, so comfortable that most nights she falls asleep before she can even turn a page in her bedtime book. The sheets are 800-thread count Egyptian cotton, imported from Italy and covered with waterlilies.

In her splendid new bed, she never has to wake in the middle of the night to the sound of guttural snoring.  There are no more mornings when a sweaty body is pressed claustrophobically against hers. Nobody steals the covers on a cold night.The space is all hers and she uses it all, sleeping square in the middle of the bed.

She’s fine.

*

One Saturday night, she goes on a date. A man named Sean, who she met on Match.com. He’s a lawyer, a few years younger than she is, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and black-rimmed glasses.

They meet at a sushi bar downtown. Sean is courteous and pulls out her chair for her. She likes that. He talks about bankruptcy law and tennis.

“So, you’re a doctor?” he asks.

Scully sets down her chopsticks onto the little ceramic holder and nods. “I’ve been a pediatrician for the last ten years,” she said.

He picks up the last piece of unagi roll on the platter. “What did you do before that?”

How do I even explain, she thinks. How do I encapsulate nearly a decade of little green men? How could I ever make it sound remotely sane to this person? “I was an FBI agent.”

“Really,” he says. “Did you ever have to shoot anyone?”

She nods.

“Do you own a gun now?”

She nods again.  Shadowy men and their equally shadowy conspiracies are still out there.

“I’m anti-gun,” Sean says, puffing out his chest. “I don’t think it could ever work out with us if you own a gun.”

No, it couldn’t. And she knows, somewhere deep down in her chest, that it probably wouldn’t work out with anyone else.

*

What she doesn’t tell anyone, including Kathryn, is that she feels like she’s drowning. She doesn’t say that almost every night she has nightmares. She dreams of being shot, being cut open, being shoved into the trunk of a car. She dreams of her own body, frozen in Antarctica.

It doesn’t escape her notice that her dreams are all about violation.

She wakes in the night and sits up in her brand new bed, gasping and coughing, her body drenched in sweat. It’s only at those times, those bleak hours in the middle of the night, that she feels utterly alone in her brave new world.

She should tell Kathryn but somehow she feels ashamed.

*

Call it a relapse, if you will.

That’s the frustrating part. No matter how silent and empty everything became with Mulder, the sex was always good. No, good is the understatement of the year. The sex was always mind-blowing.  Everything they couldn’t say to each other they said with their hands, mouths, and bodies.

She misses it, misses him. Misses the warmth of his tongue trailing down the length of her body. She misses driving home from work, anticipating that night’s pleasure. Oh, she misses those lost weekends in the very beginning when they hardly got out of bed because they couldn’t stop. They’d been denied for so long.

On an early spring Sunday morning, she decides to replace the overhead lighting fixture in the kitchen. It’s strangely old-fashioned looking in her space-age black granite kitchen. She buys a new one at Home Depot, but when she gets home, she realizes she needs a ladder. Only one person she knows owns a ladder.

Mulder is there within the hour. It’s still uncomfortable between them. It probably always will be. It’s even more so now after she made a pass at him months ago on his birthday and he turned her down. It was the right thing for him to do, she realizes, but awkward all the same.

He’s good-natured about the request, making stilted jokes about being a manly man with a toolbox. Mulder is wearing his oldest navy Yankees t-shirt and a pair of jeans that cling to him just  _so_. She leans against the counter and watches him work, trying to keep her mouth closed. Standing on the ladder, his shirt rides up a little, baring a few inches of his back.

Don’t move, she tells herself. Don’t you  _dare_  move.

It’s clear he’s been working out lately. His arms are thicker than before, corded with muscle. She thinks about what his chest must look like with that t-shirt off. She thinks about a lot of things, none of them remotely conducive to healthy relationship dissolution.

She knows it wouldn’t be fair to him or to her, either. She knows this.

But it doesn’t stop her from taking two steps to him, to placing her hand on that bare spot on his back. He doesn’t stop her, either. He stumbles down the ladder, turns to her and kisses her with a need so fierce it scares her.

This is bad, she thinks as they land on her bed, pieces of their clothes landing on the floor below. I shouldn’t start something I’m not sure I want to finish. 

And then she stops thinking for a long time.

When she wakes from a thick, dreamless sleep several hours later, Mulder is gone but the new lighting fixture has been properly installed. She flicks the light on and off, willing herself not to cry.

That night she dreams of Donnie Pfaster, filling her bathtub with hot water.

*

The branches on the trees outside the house looked withered and dead on the night she decided to leave him.

“I’m not taking it,” he said, shoving a handful of files into the metal cabinet in his home office.

“Why? It’s a good job.” He’d been offered a position at Richmond University teaching criminal justice. It would still leave him plenty of time for research.

“It’s not what I’m here to do. You know that.”

She suppressed a sigh. “Mulder—“

He interrupted her,scowling. “You think I need to get with the program, become a productive human being, but don’t you see I’m trying to stop this thing from happening?”

2012 had come and gone and the lights never appeared in the sky. Colonization never descended upon the unsuspecting people of Earth. This didn’t faze Mulder. Three days after New Year’s Day, he flew to Arizona after reading reports of children missing time.

I can’t do this, she thought. This is not the life I want anymore. I want Sunday dinners, and weekend vineyard trips, and to be able to explain to people what my partner does for a living in one simple sentence.  I want to talk about everything that’s happened to us, to sort it out so it makes something resembling sense. I want you to love me more than your quest.

He never would. She knew that now.

It was time.

*

She’s lucky that her condo is close enough to Our Lady of Sorrows to be able to walk to work if she’s in the mood. On this blooming May afternoon, Scully walks slowly home, sniffing newly-mown grass and feeling the sun on her bare arms.

Two blocks from her place, something stops her at the middle school soccer field. Boys are sprinting down the field, kicking and shouting. Proud parents are sitting in the bleachers and rooting for their sons.

She remembers now, even though she tried hard to forget this year.   
  


His birthday is today. William.

He’s fourteen now, a teenager. Probably in middle school, just like these lanky, pimply boys on the field. She wonders if he plays soccer, too, and if his adoptive parents are cheering for him as he tries to kick a goal.

She wonders if he’s normal. And if he’s happy.

She wonders if he hates her.

She turns from the field and walks faster to her building. She can’t get away quickly enough from the sound of the boys’ happy voices.

Back at home, she changes into her oldest, rattiest bathrobe and collapses on the bed. She rages at an invisible Mulder. Why did you leave us? Why weren’t you there? Why didn’t you protect him? He was yours, too. He had your eyes and your smile and you never knew him. You never sang to him, or changed his diaper or listened to him laughing to himself in his crib.

Her breasts ache, as if they’re filling with milk for William again. Her arms feel too light, so empty. She’ll never know what happened to him. She can’t, to keep him safe. She’ll never know and it’s going to kill her.

I’ll always hate you for this, Mulder, she thinks, wiping tears away with her bathrobe sleeve. No matter what I’ll always hate you.

And I’ll always hate myself, too. Because I failed our son.

She hears a knock at the door and she sits up with a start. Who could be there? The doorman is supposed to call up if she has a visitor. But she knows perfectly well who’s at the door. Condominium security is child’s play to Mulder.

She walks to the door, futilely scrubbing at her face with a tissue and blowing her nose. She knows she looks a fright, wrapped in a moth-eaten bathrobe, her eyes red and her hair wild.

Mulder is there, his eyes hollow and shaded. “I’m sorry to just show up but I wanted to make sure you were all right. Because of today…”

He remembers, too. Of course he remembers.

She opens the door wider to let him inside.

“We need to talk,” she says. “We need to talk about William.”

*

“How are you doing today, Dana?” Kathryn leans forward.

“I’m fine,” Scully says, as if rote. And then she stops herself. Time to tell the truth to her therapist, too.

“No, forget what I said.” She takes a deep breath.

“I’m not fine. I’m not fine at all.”


End file.
